Sideshow: Stories — Sidney Thompson

Sideshow features characters born from the rich, schizophrenic melting pot of the modern South, where urban and rural, educated and uneducated, privileged and poor, and white and black mix with surprising outcomes. A sheetrock hanger copes with the loss of his hunting dogs, as well as his recent inability to kill, by adopting a poodle with heartworms to put down himself; an airbrush artist learns to counterfeit twenty-dollar bills to prove to his estranged wife that he is a genuine artist; a teenage boy becomes a peeping tom in order to discover the true reasons for his parents' divorce; a father takes his son with him to murder their next-door neighbor as a classical lesson of logic and revenge; a manager of an apartment complex is caught in a love triangle with a beautiful new tenant and her bedridden seven hundred pound husband, whose weight is matched only by his intellect. This collection displays a menagerie of everyday misfits who serve as a reminder of human fragility and how freakish we can all become when our lives lack love or truth, or we suddenly discover it.